


Kaalming Coils

by ZehWulf



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff and Humor, Light Angst, Other, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), but not to disney they know what they did, with apologies to rudyard kipling i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27639743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZehWulf/pseuds/ZehWulf
Summary: It was a good idea, Crowley would defend to his last performative breath. Or, well, it was effective, in the end, and that was practically the same thing. And anyway, he’d been napping when Aziraphale started getting into a state, so his wiles were only at half capacity.ORCrowley needs to calm his angel down and takes inspiration from something he saw in a movie once.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 170
Collections: Get A Wiggle On Zine





	Kaalming Coils

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the ["Get a Wiggle On" zine](https://wiggleonzine.tumblr.com/).
> 
> [11/21/21 Edit]: Check out the [amazing comic art](https://erinomalleyart.tumblr.com/post/635431132228435968/my-comic-piece-to-accompany-the-amazing-zehwulfs) [Erin](https://erinomalleyart.tumblr.com/) did for this fic as part of the zine!!! It's so adorable! XD

It was a good idea, Crowley would defend to his last performative breath. Or, well, it was _effective_ , in the end, and that was practically the same thing. And anyway, he'd been napping when Aziraphale started getting into a state, so his wiles were only at half capacity when he decided on his course of action.

"Angel?" he slurred, tugging his snout free of the central divot of his coils and trying to pinpoint what had pulled him from sleep.

There was a scent in the air when he flopped his tongue out and swept up the nearby aerosols with all the finesse of someone attempting to gather balloons from a party room floor. Among the dozy, cozy scents of the shop (old leather and parchment, aged wood, cocoa, and, inexplicably, tartan) was the sharp zing of a recent angelic miracle and the sour grit of angelic anxiety.

"Aziraphale?" he said, moderately more coherently, as he cast his head about more in the manner of a straw drunkenly slipping around the rim of a cup than a cunning creature of occult powers scanning for potential threats.

Aziraphale made a faint noise, and Crowley weeble-wobbled his gaze in the correct direction. The angel was frozen at attention by the desk, a faintly glowing sheet of memo paper clutched so hard in one hand the whole thing was starting to slowly implode around his fingers. Crowley didn't need to see the glitter-gold ink of the signature, or even the abandoned envelope with its broken wax seal infused with holy oil, to know who it was from.

"Oi, none of that," he said, attempting to sound stern but too sleep-addled for it to come off better than a whinge. "Get over here."

He heaved up the back of his coils to free the very end of his tail and stretched it across the short distance between the sofa and the desk to twine around the wrist still holding the memo.

Aziraphale's skin was clammy beneath his scales, and Crowley could feel the too-fast, thready beat of his pulse. The angel didn't need a functioning circulatory system, but sometimes their corporations automatically tried to translate what they were feeling in times of great stress into human-like responses. Crowley figured it for a well-intentioned but typically less-than-helpful coping mechanism, for which he kept trying to miracle a better emergency "off" button. Aziraphale, when he was feeling charitable instead of mortified over bodily misbehaviors, would say their corporations were "trying their best, the poor things."

"Aziraphaaaale," he groaned, shoving as much performative exasperation as he could into the syllables, and tugged gently on the angel's wrist.

The movement made the paper crinkle, and Aziraphale finally stirred.

"Oh—oh, dear, terribly sorry, Crowley," he stuttered, moving to turn around before catching himself and keeping his face turned away. "You were saying something?"

"Just come here, angel," he griped. It made it worse, he'd found, when he tried to come over too tender, too understanding when Aziraphale got like this. He thought he was getting better at finding the right balance of snark and cautious give, though.

"Gabriel's suggested I come up and help with the effort to whiteboard the next attempt at the Great Plan. Something about a 'literal blue sky approach'—"

"Aziraphale—"

"—He says it isn't fair to the host or the world for me to keep my light under a bushel, which I'm not convinced isn't a jab at you, my dear."

"He's a sanctimonious, hypocritical git with terrible taste in music, and you should burn that passive-aggressive, shit attempt at a guilt trip—just like the last ones—and _then_ you should come here so I can squeeze the anxiety right out of you."

The diatribe effectively shut Aziraphale up. He finally turned to blink owlishly in Crowley's direction, eyes glassy and cheeks shining.

Another suggestive tug of his tail convinced Aziraphale to pivot and take a step toward him, making the heave of his chest straining the fabric of his shirt more visible. The memo quivered as his trembling fingertips loosened their grip.

"That'ssss it," Crowley hissed approvingly, unconsciously starting to sway his head from side to side. "Lissssten to me. Drop the paper and come here."

Aziraphale's mouth pursed faintly, and the distressing upward pinch of his eyebrows finally started to relax.

"Crowley, are you trying to hypnotize me?" he asked with equal parts polite disbelief and amusement.

The question, the situation, the faint outlines of his plan, and maybe the echoes of something he dreamt, collided to spark possibly the most inappropriately appropriate recollection in his long memory. Suddenly, he was catapulted back to the late sixties and sitting in a dark theater during the premiere of a certain children's movie, popcorn bag hanging forgotten in one hand as he stared in mute betrayal and bafflement at the screen, and then hastily at the patrons sitting nearest him.

It was barmy. He knew it from the moment the idea started to fully coalesce, but it was also kind of morbidly hilarious, so he decided to just go with it.

"Trussssst in me," he crooned, "just in me."

Aziraphale's lip purse upgraded to a full-on disapproving moue, but he didn't resist being reeled in by the wrist, finally letting the memo slip to the floor as he crossed the space and took a seat on the sofa next to Crowley.

Crowley wasted no time slinking his way round and round the angel, using Aziraphale's beloved plush torso like a spool for all his scaly reassurance and protection. Once Crowley had wound the angel up proper, with a few trailing switchback loops of tail pinning his thighs to the sofa, he tucked his snout up against the vulnerable hollow just behind Aziraphale's left ear and settled in with a gentle, full-body squeeze.

Aziraphale grunted softly at the treatment but didn't protest.

"Shut your eyesss," Crowley couldn't help continuing to murmur, sing-song, "and trusssst in me."

"I know you're quoting some sort of popular culture thing you think I won't understand," Aziraphale said tartly, but he was slowly relaxing tense muscles into the strength of Crowley's coils.

"You think so?" Crowley asked neutrally. The frantic tattoo of Aziraphale's heart was starting to slow, which was making him feel not a little bit smug, so he admitted: "Saw this in a movie once."

Just to show off, he tried squeezing in patterns: first the coils around the chest, then the belly, then around the shoulders, then a few cascading ripples—top down, bottom up. Aziraphale hummed in approval and sank further into his clutches.

Still, the angel's tone was dripping with familiar sanctimonious incredulity when he asked, "You saw a snake perform shibari in a motion picture?"

Crowley tensed and peeled his head back so he could more properly protest: "Shi— _what_? This isn't—! If anything, this is a _hug_."

"Oh? How positively tender of you, my dear," Aziraphale cooed, looking far too bastardly for having over half of his corporation literally constricted. "And no need to sound defensive, Crowley. There are plenty of meditative and calming benefits to the art."

"It'ssss not sssshibari," Crowley hissed. "They wouldn't put kink in a kids film—er…"

Aziraphale nearly literally lit up at the slip. "A _children_ 's film? Crowley," he gasped, sounding delightedly scandalized. "I know you're a bit of a cinephile—"

"You take that back." It was just a _hobby_. And anyway, all the cinephiles he'd met got unbearably precious about the gloomy ones.

"—but I wasn't aware you liked… oh, but I do remember you inviting me to see that animated featurette of Winnie the Pooh back in… oh, sometime in the sixties, was it? Before I gave you the holy water, I think."

Crowley steadily cringed back in the face of the sleuthing. He could hardly admit he saw that the same actor who voiced Winnie the Pooh was set to voice his favorite character from Kipling's series in an upcoming film and decided to give it a try. It wasn't his fault Disney turned a cool, wise mentor figure into a sniveling child eater with personal space issues.

Still, the concept of a literal fully-body coil had looked... cozy, after a fashion.

And that bloody song was an infernal earworm.

"Don't worry about it, angel," he tried, and gave what he thought was a particularly dexterous squeeze in hopes of distracting him.

Aziraphale sighed and favored him with a beatific smile, slumped all but boneless in Crowley's careful grip.

And yet: "I don't seem to recall a snake residing in the Hundred Acre Wood," Aziraphale murmured with all the innocence of a man-shaped being with four different first edition sets of Milne's works squirreled away in his shop.

"I said don't worry about it," Crowley insisted, darting forward to nip at Aziraphale's earlobe.

As expected, the angel shrunk away with a full-body giggle. "All right, you fiend, I'll not pry into your mystique further," he conceded on a sigh, and relaxed back again, lolling his neck a bit against the cool rest of Crowley's scales. "Even if you have questionable taste in film."

Crowley groaned in defeat and settled for hiding his face back in the crook of Aziraphale's neck. The angelic bastard wiggled happily in his coily confines and briefly rested his cheek on Crowley's head before leaning back again.

"This really is quite lovely, darling," he murmured, voice brimming with suppressed mirth and a frankly mortifying amount of warmth. "Just the ticket."

"Any time," Crowley grumbled, and gave one last squeeze before settling in for the evening.

**Author's Note:**

> The voice actor Crowley's talking about is Sterling Holloway, who did a lot of voice work for Disney back in the day, including Winnie the Pooh, Kaa the snake, the Cheshire Cat, that stork from Dumbo, etc. He's got a very distinctive voice, so I always recognized him across movies as a kid. :D
> 
> If you're wondering if the Kaa scenes from "The Jungle Book" really are that extra, I can assure you they are. I had a seed of the idea for the fic based on my half-remembered impressions of the movie but went to youtube to find clips to check myself and was NOT disappointed.


End file.
